BC:05-05-09

fallen a bit behind it seems.

May 5th, 2009 7:13 am
Air Force None
The New York Post says that none of the photos taken during the VC-25 flyover of Manhattan will be released to the public, by order. “The $328,835 snapshots of an Air Force One backup plane buzzing lower Manhattan last week will not be shown to the public, the White House said yesterday. ‘We have no plans to release them,’ an aide to President Obama told The Post, refusing to comment further.”

May 4th, 2009 8:19 pm
The PKK loses its gamble
Noah Shachtman at Wired reports that Iranian helicopters have carried out airstrikes on Kurdish villages in Iraq, the first since the US toppled Saddam Hussein.

May 4th, 2009 6:33 am
Why should they worry?
The Voice of America reports that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is on a trip to the Middle East to reassure Egypt and Saudi Arabia that it is not abandoning them simply because it is engaging Iran.

May 4th, 2009 6:21 am
The taxman cometh
Open thread. Will Obama’s new tax compliance initiatives drive more companies overseas or is it simply a way of getting tax cheats to pay their fair share to the public coffers?

May 3rd, 2009 10:13 pm
Moral integrity
Step right up folks and take your political correctness quiz. For five points: who does a progressive person cheer for in a head-on clash between the NYT company and it’s unions?

May 3rd, 2009 9:36 pm
All roads lead to Rome
Lobbying is now a boom industry. The New York Times reports that in an era when people find they can do without many things, the one thing they can’t do without is influence in Washington. In an article entitled “Lobbyists Prosper in Downturn”, the NYT notes that while

May 3rd, 2009 4:01 pm
Houston, we’ve got a problem
The Examiner’s Caroline Grannan warns readers about the dangers of letting a ‘titan’ named Leo Linbeck III “build an empire of KIPP schools … Leo is also very involved with KIPP, one of the most successful public charter school programs in the U.S. He has been the ‘Chief Growth Architect’ at KIPP:Houston, leading the development of a plan to grow to 42 KIPP:Houston schools in the next 8 years, ” and involved with trying to match up high school teachers with scholars.

May 3rd, 2009 3:22 am
I will decide who gets what
Megan McArdle asks how you would want a hedge fund to behave if it handled your money. It’s not entirely an idle question. Hedge funds often represent institutional investors. The NYT reported in 2005 that one of pension funds that had moved assets into hedge funds was the General Motors fund. It’s been alleged, though I haven’t been able to find a hard citation, that the UAW pension fund is partly invested in hedge funds.

May 2nd, 2009 3:45 pm
Not exactly nine to five
How does this compare with working for ACORN? An NYT article entitled Dream job: Training Afghans as bullets fly describes the life of two Marines in outpost with 30 Afghans. “Their senior mentor, Cpl. Sean P. Conroy, of Carmel, N.Y., is 25 years old. His assistant, Lance Cpl. Brandon J. Murray, of Fort Myers, Fla., is 21.”

May 2nd, 2009 3:32 pm
Let loose the dogs of words
The New York Post says that “print reporters have posted a sign in the desk area of the White House press room reading, ‘Blog-Free Zone.’” (Hat tip: James Linville). I wonder what that’s supposed to mean?

May 2nd, 2009 2:37 pm
Lost
History will probably remember the Guantanamo Bay prison for longer than the already forgotten Prison S-21, where up to 20,000 people were tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge. “Even though the vast majority of the victims were Cambodian, foreigners were also imprisoned, including Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, Pakistanis, Britons, Americans, New Zealanders and Australians.” These were captured on the high seas as they were sailing through the South China Sea. “They included four Americans, three French, two Australians, a Briton and a New Zealander. One of the last prisoners to die was American Michael Scott Deeds, who was captured with his friend Chris De Lance while sailing from Singapore to Hawaii.”

May 1st, 2009 10:26 pm
A land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new
In Eric Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy, the insignificant protagonist, Joseph Vadassy, is accidentally caught up in intrigue at a beach resort where behind the gay facade, danger lurked unseen. While sitting in the garden he observed that despite appearances, all around him in the flowers, a vast tableau of death was being played out among insects and nocturnal birds, with unseen tragedy just behind every beautiful petal. Nothing in the world, he observed, was quite as unblemished as it seemed, as he would learn when the police came for him on subject he knew nothing about.

May 1st, 2009 8:28 pm
Thanks but no thanks
Andy McCarthy declines an invitation to participate in “the President’s Task Force on Detention Policy”. The text is at the link. Most of the reasons for his refusal are straightforward.

May 1st, 2009 1:06 pm
In the central blue
Here are two interesting articles on how well Russian air to air would fare against US aircraft. The first tries to estimate the effectiveness of Russian Beyond Visual Range missiles against the US capabilities and argues that Russian aircraft, with their large missile loadouts and huge missile airframes can compensate somewhat for US quality by firing multiple missile salvos, which in many-on-many situations can generate a one for one tradeoff against US aircraft.

April 30th, 2009 7:46 am
Sealed with a kiss
The BBC reports that the suspects in the Hariri murder are off the hook as Hillary Clinton vowed never to “sell out” Lebanon in an AP article.

April 30th, 2009 3:38 am
The price of safety
So does this mean that Barack Obama agrees me? Or do political circumstances only create the illusion? The LA Times reports that the President has acknowledged that voluntarily refusing to employ certain forms of coercive interrogation may make it harder to obtain intelligence from enemy captives. However, he is willing to pay the moral price.

April 29th, 2009 4:04 pm
Up, up and away
A 6′4″ Eric Hagerman says he dreads flying because there simply isn’t enough space in an economy class seat for his outsized frame. More importantly, he argues there isn’t enough space in it for the ‘average’ sized person. The passenger can get into the space provided, but once there, he is practically immobile.